The Natural Environment for Children’s Self-Education

The Sudbury Valley School is in these ways like a hunter-gatherer band.

A major theme of this blog is that we come into the world with instincts that are well designed to promote our education. We have instincts to observe, explore, play, and converse with others in ways that endow us with the skills, knowledge, and values needed to live and thrive in the physical and social world into which we are born. We do this with great intensity and joy. These educational instincts were shaped by natural selection during the hundreds of thousands of years in which our ancestors survived as hunter-gatherers (see August 2 posting). We might expect, therefore, that these instincts would operate best in the social environment of a hunter-gatherer band, or in a modern environment that replicates certain aspects of a hunter-gatherer band.

For the past forty years, the Sudbury Valley School has been proving that the human instincts for self-education can provide the foundation for education in our modern society. At this school, children and adolescents explore, play, and converse as they please--without adult direction or prodding--and then graduate and go out into the world as successful adults (see August 13 posting). I have spent a good deal of time observing Sudbury Valley to understand how students learn there, and I have also surveyed the anthropological literature to understand how hunter-gatherer children and adolescents learn. This research has convinced me that Sudbury Valley works so beautifully as an educational institution because it replicates those elements of a hunter-gatherer band that are most essential to self-education.

Here I offer a list of what seem to me to be the most crucial ingredients of the natural environment for self-directed learning. Anthropologists report that these ingredients exist in the hunter-gather bands they have studied [1], and I have seen that all of these ingredients exist at the Sudbury Valley School.

Time and space for play and exploration

Self-education through play and exploration requires enormous amounts of unscheduled time--time to do whatever one wants to do, without pressure, judgment, or intrusion from authority figures. That time is needed to make friends, play with ideas and materials, sort things out, experience and overcome boredom, and develop passions. In hunter-gatherer bands adults place few demands on children and adolescents, because they recognize that young people need to explore and play on their own to become competent adults. The same is true at Sudbury Valley.

Self-education also requires space--space to roam, to get away, to explore. That space should, ideally, encompass the full range of terrains relevant to the culture in which one is developing. Hunter-gatherer adults trust their children to use good judgment in deciding how far they should venture away from others into possibly dangerous areas. At Sudbury Valley, children are likewise trusted, within the limits set by prudence in our modern, litigious society. They can explore the surrounding woods, fields, and nearby stream, and by signing out to let others know where they are going, they can venture as far off campus as they choose.

Free age mixing

An enormous amount of learning occurs in interactions with others. When we segregate children by age, in schools, we deprive them of the opportunity to interact with those others from whom they have the most to learn. In hunter-gatherer tribes, and at Sudbury Valley, children and adolescents regularly, on their own initiative, play and explore in widely age-mixed groups.

In age-mixed groups, younger children acquire skills, information, ideas, and inspiration from older ones. In such groups, younger children can do things that would be too dangerous, or too complicated, for them to do alone or just with others their own age. Older children also benefit from age-mixed interactions. They learn how to be leaders and nurturers. They develop a sense of responsibility for others. They also consolidate and extend their own knowledge through explaining things to younger children. Free age mixing is so crucial to self-directed learning that I plan to devote two or three future postings specifically to that topic.

Access to knowledgeable and caring adults

In hunter-gatherer bands, the adult world is not segregated from the children's world. Children see what adults do and incorporate that into their play. They also hear the adults' stories, discussions, and debates, and they learn from what they hear. When they need adult help, or have questions that cannot be answered by other children, they can go to any of the adults in the band. All of the adults care for them. Most of the adults, in fact, are their aunts and uncles.

At Sudbury Valley, too, adults and children mingle freely (there are 10 full-time staff members and roughly 200 students, between the ages of 4 and 19). There is no place in the school where staff members can go but students cannot. Students can listen into any adult discussions and observe whatever the adults are doing, and they can join in if they wish. Students who need help of any kind can go to any of the staff members. A child who needs a lap to sit on, or a shoulder to cry on, or personal advice, or the answer to some technical question that he hasn't been able to find on his own, knows just which adult will best satisfy his need. The adults are not literally aunts and uncles, but they are much like aunts and uncles. They know all of the students over the entire span of time that they are students at the school (unlike teachers in a conventional school who know each set of kids for just one year) and take pride in watching them develop. Since the staff members must be re-elected each year by vote of all of the students in the school, they are necessarily people who like kids and are liked by kids.

Access to equipment

To learn to use the tools of a culture, people need access to those tools. Hunter-gatherer children play with knives, digging sticks, bows and arrows, snares, musical instruments, dugout canoes, and all of the other items of equipment that are crucial to their culture. At Sudbury Valley, children have access to a wide range of the equipment that is of most general use to people in our culture, including computers, woodworking equipment, cooking equipment, art materials, sporting equipment of various types, and many walls filled with books.

Free exchange of ideas

Intellectual development occurs best in a setting where people can share ideas freely, without censorship or fear of being ostracized. According to anthropologists' reports, hunter-gatherers are non-dogmatic in their beliefs, even in their religious beliefs. People can say what they please, without fear, and ideas that have any consequence to the group are debated endlessly. The same is true at Sudbury Valley. The school has deliberately refrained from becoming aligned with any particular religious or political ideology. All ideas are on the table. In this kind of environment an idea is something to think about and debate, not something to memorize and feed back on a test. Daniel Greenberg, the school's leading philosopher, has described the school as "a free marketplace of ideas." Children who may not hear much discussion of politics or religion at home hear it at school, and they hear every side of every issue.

To feel free to explore and play a person must feel safe, free from harassment and bullying. Such freedom occurs to a remarkable extent both in hunter-gatherer bands and at Sudbury Valley. According to anthropologists, the close-knit personal relationships, the age mixing, and the non-competitive, egalitarian ethos of hunter-gatherer cultures work effectively to prevent serious bullying. If an older or bigger child appears to be picking on a younger or smaller one, others will step in and quickly stop it. The same occurs at Sudbury Valley. Moreover, at Sudbury Valley the school's democratically created rules and judicial system, in which children of all ages are involved, prevent serious bullying. Students who feel harassed or bullied can "bring up" the offender, to appear before the Judicial Committee, comprised of school members of all ages. This contrasts sharply with the case in many conventional schools, where bullying is a way of life. Students there who report bullying are snitches or tattle-tales, and teachers can get away with bullying because they make the rules and are not subject to them.

Immersion in democratic processes

Hunter-gatherer bands and the Sudbury Valley School are, in quite different ways, democracies. Hunter-gatherer bands do not have chiefs or "big men" who make decisions for the group. Instead, all group decisions are made through long discussions, until a clear majority of those who care have come to agreement. Anybody, including children, can take part in these discussions. Sudbury Valley is administered through a formal democratic process, involving discussions and votes of the School Meeting, where each student and staff member who chooses to attend has an equal vote. Immersion in the democratic process endows each person with a sense of responsibility that helps to motivate education. If my voice counts, if I have a real say in what the group does and how it operates, then I'd better think things through carefully and speak wisely. I'm responsible not just for myself, but also for my community, so that is a good reason for me to educate myself in the things that matter to my community.--------In sum, my contention is that the natural environment for learning--which existed during our long history as hunter-gatherers and is replicated at the Sudbury Valley School--is one in which people (a) have much free time and space in which to play and explore; (b) can mix freely with others of all ages; (c) have access to culturally relevant tools and equipment and are free to play and explore with those items; (d) are free to express and debate any ideas that they wish to express and debate; (e) are free from bullying (which includes freedom from being ordered around arbitrarily by adults); and (f) have a voice that is heard in the group's decision-making process.

How different this is from the environment of conventional schools. How ironic: In conventional schools we deprive children of all of the elements of their natural environment for learning, and then we try to teach them something!

Dear Mr. Gray,
On Aug. 2, you stated: "In our culture, unlike in hunter-gatherer cultures, there are countless different ways of making a living, countless different sets of skills and knowledge that children might acquire, and it is impossible for children in their daily lives to observe all those adult skills directly. In our culture, unlike in hunter-gatherer cultures, children are largely segregated from the adult work world, which reduces their opportunities to see what adults do and incorporate those activities into their play." I thought that was a good point, which called into question whether the method of education used in a hunter gatherer society would be applicable to our society. but i don't see where you've answered that as yet.

after all, children can't readily observe all professions and adult behavior. much of the work is mental with extensive prerequisites. there is an abstractness to modern work entirely missing from the HG society.

is our present culture so different from a hunter gatherer culture that it requires a different means of education?

In my Aug. 2 posting I used the words you quoted to show that we cannot assume, on a priori grounds,that an educational method that works for hunter-gatherers would work in our culture. There are some reasons--most notably the ones you quoted--for thinking it might not. However, to me, the real proof is in the pudding, the empirical grounds. The success of people who have been allowed to learn in this way, in the kind of environment I have described above, forces me to conclude that it does work.

My study of the graduates of Sudbury Valley convinced me that self-education works in our culture. Much of my subsequent work has centered on how it works, and some of my future postings will be devoted to that. For example, I'm planning two or three postings on the role of age mixing, and they will explain how age mixing helps to solve the exposure problem.

I might also add now that the students at Sudbury Valley develop a rich culture, which encompasses many of the general aspects of the larger adult culture. While hunter-gatherer children play at hunting, gathering, and the kinds of skills that are essential to success in their culture, students at Sudbury Valley play at computers and at many sorts of games that involve abstract means of thinking. They develop the general kinds of mental as well as physical skills that are required for a wide range of jobs in our culture. They do this not usually because they are deliberately educating themselves, but because it is natural to be drawn to the categories of activities that are seen as exciting and valuable in the larger culture.

It is also true that precisely because there are so many ways of making a living in our culture there is no need (nor any possibility) that each child will learn everything that is considered important to the culture. Different children in our culture who are educating themselves may take quite different paths and thereby fill different of the niches available.

Ultimately, of course, once a person has made a decision to become a professional of some sort--say, a doctor--it is crucial to learn directly from others who are such specialists. Neither Sudbury Valley nor conventional schools provide these opportunities. That is why we need specialized schools of higher education, such as medical schools.

You say above that "there is an abstractness to modern culture entirely missing from HG society." I agree in part with this, but would not put it in such an extreme way. I would contend that all expert thought--whether it is conducted by hunter-gatherers who are speculating about the direction of movement of an antelope they are tracking, based on a couple of bent pieces of grass, or modern physicians speculating on the best way to treat a particular person's cancer--involve a combination of empirical knowledge and hypothetical "if-then" reasoning. Children at play in our culture engage in a great deal of such reasoning, and my bet is that those in hunter-gatherer cultures do too. The general reasoning abilities develop through play. The very specific ways of applying those abilities to a particular specialty require further specialized experience.

Well, I've taken a sort of shot-gun approach to answering your question, just hinting at various ideas that taken all together help. Keep tuned, as I do think that future postings will shed more light on the issue you raise.

Meanwhile, I hope that other readers--perhaps especially some of those involved in the nonschooling movement--will provide their thoughts on this issue.

i have a particularly difficult time imagining a system for adolescent education. i feel sure that it would include the possibility of internship/apprenticeship, and other methods of getting kids out of school and into real world communities.
and in this regard, I am particularly struck by the lack of financial responsibility of most teens. Since their expenses are, for the most part, paid by their parents or the school system, there isn't anything they have to do to pay their way in the world, until they are ejected from the home and must make a living. It seems like there should be a gradual way of introducing financial responsibility at an earlier age. What do you think of the old system of apprenticeships in the teen years?

Lou, thank you for your comments here. Your emphasis on responsibility is the flip side of my emphasis on freedom. The two go together. When we run adolescents' lives, we deprive them of the opportunity to take responsibility--to figure out how to get where they want to get, how to learn what they want to learn, how to solve their own problems, and, as you say, how to earn and manage money.

Concerning apprenticeship, my answer depends on whether a person is talking about forced or freely chosen apprenticeship. Much of the "apprenticeship" of earlier times was in fact a system of forced child labor. Children of poor families were farmed out to tradesmen, who would work them like slaves. Eventually some of those children would acquire an ability that would allow them to become tradesmen themselves, but there was no guarantee. My view is that apprenticeship is wonderful if the initiative comes from the adolescents themselves. But that requires a system of education in which children and adolescents are free to explore and develop serious interests, which they then want to develop further through apprenticeships.

I stumbled across an article you wrote that a home schooling friend of mine had posted. Those of us in the home schooling community have recognized the finer points of what you are saying for some time and many apply similar principles in our homes as we teach our children. Many of us participate in support groups that are comprised of youth and adults of all ages and where all seemingly accept this without prejudice that one might be younger and therefor less cool or another superior.
We are preparing for a new year and were selecting what we would be studying, something I give my "students" a lot of say in. I wish you could have seen the look on my much younger sister's face (she's still in high school) when I handed my children a book and asked them if they were interested in studying it.
My husband and I, partially by accident, and partially by intent, have subscribed to the thought that children learn best by example and when given the freedom of thought and decision making.
They have been earning allowance for their chores since they were small and have been given freedom in how to spend it. We started from a young age teaching them about decisions and their consequences, both on a financial front and other areas of life.
Many of our family scoffed at us and criticized as treating our children as "little adults" as they called it. However, we've found it works. We took our, then four year old, son to Day Out With Thomas and the only way to leave was through the gift shop. Our son had a nice wad of birthday money. I told him he could spend it there and buy less as the prices were higher because it was a special event. Or when we got home I would take him to the local store and he could buy more for the money. The choice was his and I put no pressure on him. Even standing there with all that shiny new merchandise he chose to wait. He had learned in part through example and in part from past decisions.
My children are now almost twelve and almost fourteen. They are comfortable talking to and hanging out with people of all ages. For as much as I do teach them, they enjoy large amounts of free time and are free to pursue their interests which range from reading, collecting antiques, sewing, music-both listening and playing, story writing,and various other pursuits. My daughter wants to design clothing and my son wants to start an animated production company that will compete with Disney. I smile and encourage them.
I wish you could see the faces of friends and family when our children join conversations that should be "over their heads" and demonstrate an understanding. They are as likely to talk politics and theological debate as they are what music they enjoy and usually with a vocabulary that could put some adults to shame.
Before you think I am boasting on myself, let me correct you. This has been an experiment, just as all parenting is, and I can take very little credit. I have simply drawn a safety net around a large portion of life and allowed my children to freely roam inside its bounds and taken an approach somewhere between un-schooling and organized traditional schooling. The rest has been up to them.

Peter, I've been thinking for some time about the ancient and
archetypal role of "teacher", which has incredible prestige in our and other cultures, and which is devalued in the Sudbury world, so much so that the term isn't even used. I wondered if you could comment.

Lou, thank you for raising this issue. In the back of my mind I've for some time been thinking about writing an essay, or maybe a short series, on this very question. It may be a while before I get to it, however. I'd be interested in hearing more about your thinking and more from anyone else browsing through here who has thoughts on this question. Meanwhile, here are a couple of quick thoughts of mine:

Whatever the archetypal role of "teacher" might be, that has been pretty well corrupted by today's common use of the word "teacher" as it applies to the standard school system. We have set things up so that students are forced to spend enormous amounts of time with particular "teachers," not of their own choosing, who are charged with the task of making them "learn" particular subjects and who, to accomplish that task, are given enormous power to dictate to students what they must do. The implicit idea here is that students' learning is the responsibility of teachers. Students just have to do what they are told and, voila, they will become educated. In the archetypal concept, I think, the teacher is sought out by the student, who is eager to learn from the teacher. Here the student, not the teacher, is ultimately in charge of the process because he or she is there willingly and can leave if not satisfied. Our system of putting teachers in charge of students' activities leads to the implicit if not explicit conclusion that the teacher, not the student, is responsible for students' learning. I have often heard people say things like, "I don't know anything about X because I had a bad teacher in X." Sudbury schools want to make it clear that learning is the students' responsibility, and there are lots of ways to learn. So, they don't use the term "teacher" for the adult staff, because that would suggest that their job--like that of "teachers" in other schools--is to coax or coerce kids to learn certain things.

Moving beyond that, I personally have mixed feelings about the concept of "the great teacher," the guru--which might be what you have in mind when you refer to the archetypal role. I have actually never found such a person, even though I've had more than one Nobel prize winner as teacher in my educational past. I think that concept, to some degree, is a holdover from an earlier age when people thought of knowledge as somehow descending down from the gods through special people, the teachers, who had special insights, who somehow knew the "truth." My own view of knowledge is much more bottom-up (more Protestant than Catholic). It emerges from our collective thinking, observations, testing of hypotheses, etc. If we want to be educated it is our job to think critically about ideas, not accept them blindly, no matter from whom they come, rather than to absorb the truth from Aristotle, or Moses, or the Pope.

However, none of this is to deny that much of our learning is social. We learn a lot from other people. In fact, that is the whole purpose of language; it is what makes us the educative animal. We can share our experiences and learn from one another. We do that all the time. At Sudbury schools almost every conversation--whether it's between kids and staff, kids and kids, or staff and staff--involves teaching. People share thoughts, ideas, knowledge. People seek out other people's thoughts, ideas, knowledge. It's just that the role of "teacher" and "learner" are not fixed. Even in a single conversation, each party may be both.

Well, those are just my quick thoughts on the subject. Your question deserves more and I do hope to provide more.

Meanwhile, again, I'd value your thoughts on the question and those of anyone else browsing through here. We are all teaching and learning here, about teaching and learning.

Just a few thoughts on "teacher": it seems to me that there are different subcategories of teacher or pseudo teacher that we've identified here. I think we can recognize that even a hunter gatherer society probably has some kind of informal apprenticeship for the older children, especially teenagers, which constitutes a more intensive form of instruction. I think we can recognize that younger children can learn a lot simply by imitation and play. (Maybe they're better imitators?)

Since I do a little swim instruction, I have noticed that many children learn swimming without formal instruction, mostly by imitating. However, perfecting the stroke may later require an expert instructor.
I suspect that in the earlier years of recorded history, there were fewer sources for getting information. Books weren't widely available, for example. Most wisdom was transmitted orally. All these influences would have emphasized the importance of a "master" or teacher.
In learning a physical activity such as swimming or yoga, imitation is a good starting point, but it can't be the ending point, because most of us are not that aware of our bodies and require feedback, preferably from an expert source. But I suspect that even intellectual subjects are better taught in an interactive way, part of which can be the use of a "learning partner" - another student whom we use to bounce ideas off of.
Many thanks for your contribution.

Hi Lou,
Good point about expert instruction. I used to be a swim instructor, too--summers during high school and college as a camp waterfront director. My observation was that kids got comfortable in the water and learned to deal with it, and to swim to some degree, just through play and imitation. Those who wanted to become better asked for instruction and, yes, I was able to help them. The same is true in lots of areas. Kids at Sudbury Valley who have developed a serious interest in some activity often seek expert instruction. This can happen in music, martial arts--all sorts of endeavors. The key point, though, is that they want it and they decide how much of it they want. For motivated students, it doesn't take much instruction time to produce a big effect; the work is really done by the student--the instructor just points some things out.
Best,
Peter

Hi Lou, this is just a note to let you know that your comments have played a role in prompting me to do a series of essays on "The human nature of teaching." It starts today (April 14, 2011). I'll be interested in your thoughts and questions, which I hope you'll provide as comments on those posts. -Peter

Thank you, Peter, for your continuing clear analysis and summary of how and why unschooling works. I am like many parents who have already chosen this path of allowing our children to self-educate, and we appreciate your articles as we encourage and share our choices with others.

Dr. Gray,
This is a vivid description of what the Sudbury Valley school looks like, and I think your comparison to a hunter-gather band is interesting.

A couple things I'm wondering about here:
How did the kids there come to accept your presence as an observer? It is my understanding that they vote on whether to admit new members into their community. Did that apply to you as well? Second: you describe how older kids will step in to protect younger kids from being bullied. Do you understand that as being part of the school's "culture" (and thus possibly dependent on initial conditions which then become tradition), or do you understand this to be the instinctive behavior typical of a small hunter-gather band? Would you perhaps expect this instinct to not be able to operate in a group larger than the typical 20-40 of a hunter- gatherer group?